SBJ College: WME Sports breaks new ground with Arizona deal

The college basketball postseason is off and running with conference tournaments well underway and Selection Sunday just a few days away.

There’s nothing quite like March and the wild storylines that arise this time of year. Looking forward to a busy and fun few weeks on the hardwood.

Three Arizona schools are set to receive a helping hand in the new-look world of college athletics.

The Arizona board of regents is set to hire WME Sports to advise the athletic programs at Arizona State, Arizona and Northern Arizona around changes to the college landscape, a source told me -- a first-of-its-kind arrangement for the firm.

The strategic alignment, which is expected to be officially announced Wednesday, will center on WME assisting with areas including brand positioning, NIL development, media strategy and revenue generation.

The agreement is unique given service providers around the NIL and revenue-generation industry have generally partnered with specific schools (think Altius Sports Partners and Oklahoma, Blueprint Sports and Penn State, etc.).

WME Sports’ approach, however, ties to the board of regents that oversees varying affairs for three different schools -- a first of its kind partnership for the company with a grouping of universities with common oversight.

Anthony Leal wasn’t born when Bob Knight’s run as Indiana men’s basketball coach ended in the spring of 2000.

But 25 years later, it’s a nod to Knight and his motion offense that has Leal, a senior guard on the Hoosiers’ basketball team, chasing a business proposition that may last longer than his on-court endeavors in Bloomington.

Motion Sports, Inc., is a company Leal and co-founders and IU alums Jay Townsend and Nate Ebel created over the course of the last three years as a pseudo one-stop shop for administrators and athletes in the NIL era.

The project dates back to around 2020 when Leal, then in his freshman year at IU, began putting away a chunk of his NIL earnings. By December 2022, he’d saved enough to surprise his sister, Lauren, with a significant Christmas present -- paying off her remaining student loans.

The effort earned headlines nationwide, while other athletes reached out to Leal hoping to see similar success in their own NIL endeavors. That led to the creation of Motion -- a wink toward Knight’s patented offense.

“My DMs, texts and email and everything started to get flooded by other athletes asking me for advice, direction, or basically, like, ‘Hey, how can I do the same thing that you were able to do?’” Leal explained. “Being in the business school, I just was like, ‘Maybe there’s an opportunity for some sort of business here.’”

What’s since become Motion Sports started really as an NIL service. But with input from athletes and administrators, Leal and his co-founders expanded the platform to be more of a department-wide solution.

“It became obvious that there’s a lot bigger need than just NIL support for athletes,” Leal said. “Athletic departments as a whole really need some sort of cohesive platform that helps them with managing everything [in] day-to-day athletics, especially with the way college and sports are now and how things are changing from week-to-week and month-to-month.”

Putting NIL into motion

The platform has a number of uses, including communications, scheduling, operations management, NIL payments and, assuming the proposed House settlement passes later this spring, revenue sharing. Other practical uses include players uploading film into coaching software and signing documents related to their eligibility.

Leal noted there are a handful of schools testing the software on annual plans along with “conversations with dozens and dozens of athletic departments, from NAIA all the way up to the Power Four.”

Motion is seeking its seed round of funding ahead with the hope of launching more widely later this year. The plan, at least for now, is Leal will continue with the company full-time after wrapping up his MBA from the Kelley School of Business later this spring.

That, of course, doesn’t include whatever happens on the court -- Leal has fixations on helping the Hoosiers off the bubble and into the NCAA tournament for the third time in four years.

“It’s really exciting to see the opportunity to provide a solution from an athlete’s perspective, because these are pains and inefficiencies and things that could be improved that I’ve experienced now for the last four years,” he said. “So creating a solution from that perspective, I feel like is really unique, and it’s going to hopefully help athletes a lot during the future.”

The SEC might draw the bulk of its headlines from football, but this basketball season has fans in the Deep South thinking about the hardwood.

Garth Glissman, the conference’s associate commissioner for men’s basketball, has been at the center of helping the SEC create a clear vision for its basketball-related endeavors after spending the better part of a decade at the NBA.

Glissman spoke with SBJ on a wide range of topics around the SEC’s growing basketball product and the potential of the sport within the increasingly complicated college athletics space.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

What kind of changes to the regular season would get eyeballs on college basketball earlier?

Glissman: “We have to do more to capture the attention of fans earlier in the season, and we have to do it at a time and in windows where we’re not going to get swallowed up by football. Recognizing that football is an event-driven sport, from a ratings standpoint, you can’t win those matchups head-on. So we have to be strategic in our positioning. And my view is not to try to compete with football, but instead to try to do what we can to get our fans to think about college basketball or their favorite college basketball team just a little bit earlier in the season than they might otherwise through a more impactful opening night, a more impactful opening week.

“I don’t think exhibition games are going to move the needle materially, but it helps. It helps people just think about it sooner. These are the things that I’m thinking about. I look at March Madness as an example of something that works really well. Everybody has their different areas of focus, but I’m really focused on the regular season.”

Hasn’t the SEC this year been a case study in, if the product is good, people will watch?

Glissman: “The way I look at the SEC is it’s this incredibly iconic, tradition-rich conference. And within the context of all of that tradition, men’s basketball is still very much a growth opportunity. It’s this unique contrast. On one hand, we have all of the tradition and passion that makes the SEC special, but yet this unique growth opportunity that exists within men’s basketball.

“That’s the beauty of the opportunity in front of us is that the SEC has been around longer than the NBA, so the tradition and the fans and the passion is all there. But yet, there’s this widespread recognition that there’s still a lot of upside in basketball.”

What needs to be discussed as it relates to creating more value for men’s basketball during the regular season?

Glissman: “When you look at college football and you look at the NFL -- and I use those two as examples, because football has been king in terms of viewership and interest in this country over the last decade ... they have continued to innovate and iterate such that if you look at the NFL schedule today and college football schedule today, it’s very different than it was 20 years ago and before.

“College basketball, on the other hand, by and large, it’s the same season format that was in place when I was a kid. You have non-conference play with a relatively uneventful opening night, as I mentioned, and then some conferences are beginning to play a select conference game or two earlier in the season. But for the most part, it’s non-conference play until January. Then you have 10 weeks of conference play, and then you transition into March Madness. That’s where I look when I think about ways to improve.

“... When I was a kid, maybe you’re competing against whatever other cable programming is on TV that night. Just relatively limited competition to what we face today, which is an infinite on-demand catalog of content on Netflix and every other streaming service, social media. There’s just far more entertainment options. And so my message to college basketball is we have to work harder to compete for our fans. Our fans and people everywhere are increasingly distracted. They have more entertainment options than before, and so we have to be more strategic with our scheduling.”

• In this week’s magazine, I take a look at how the NCAA and its member schools should look at college basketball as a source of increased revenue.
• I also check in with ESPN SVP/Production Meg Aronowitz on how the network’s strategy to catch the rising wave of college women’s basketball this postseason.
• UConn selected Nations Group as the owners’ rep to guide the $100 million modernization of the 34-year-old Gampel Pavilion, notes my SBJ colleague Bret McCormick.
• McCormick also writes that Northeastern is moving forward with a new multi-use arena and athletics complex project that will house the university’s men’s and women’s basketball and hockey teams.
• Playfly has won an agency shootout for the multimedia rights to Butler, signing a 10-year pact that will begin with the Big East school in July, reports my SBJ colleague Austin Karp.